TRUEinvivo is pleased to announce that it went live on the SyndicateRoom investment platform on 27th February 2019. This enables the company to be visible to the wide network of potential investors who are registered with SyndicateRoom. The company chose SyndicateRoom as its online investment partner because of its excellent reputation in the equity crowdfunding market, its high levels of vetting and due diligence, and the professional help it gives its clients to present themselves well. SyndicateRoom joins TRUEinvivo’s offline investment network partner Nexus Investment Ventures Ltd (NIVL) in connecting TRUEinvivo with High Net Worth or Sophisticated potential investors. Note that this is an information news post and is not an invitation to invest in the company.

We are delighted to announce that, at the Board meeting on 17th January, George Sutherland was appointed as the first Chairman of TRUEinvivo Ltd. George originally joined our advisory board in 2017 and then became a shareholder and investor director in February 2018. He has been instrumental in helping us find investment partners, notably Nexus Investment Ventures Ltd., whose network members invested around 70% of our first seed round.

George is CEO of the Sutherland Health Group and has a background in medical device companies and major fast moving consumer goods. He has managed business with most of the major UK retailers and Amazon and over 25 years of experience in dealing with the NHS. He has set up, and run private companies, has raised corporate finance pre and post IPO, and founded and run a public company.

2018 has been an exciting year for TRUEinvivo. We raised our first £300k investment in January/February mainly to build our prototype fast bead reader and to develop some new concepts especially for 2D and 3D in-body measurements. We introduced our DoseMapper concept at the European industry radiotherapy and oncology (ESTRO) conference/exhibition in Barcelona in April and at the World Medical Physics Congress in Prague in May, both with amazingly good responses both from hospitals (potential customers) and industrial companies (potential partners and distributors) alike. The prototype reader was completed in November and exhibited at a couple of investor events to much interest. We also filed a new patent application for the 2D and 3D concepts.

We have recently contracted the design and build of the pre-production version of our reader to be ready in 2019 in time for regulatory approval in late summer. In parallel we are developing the DoseMapper prototype itself. These are expensive activities so we have started our next raise of £500k to achieve the important regulatory milestone which means we can sell into hospitals. We have three partner hospitals already and five more approached us so we have a pipeline!

But our market is wider than radiotherapy hospitals. In May we won an award for “the most relevant new technology in nuclear decommissioning” with specific interest from two leading organisations in that industry. In the summer we received two more serious leads in the animal health market followed in the autumn by interest from the defence and aerospace sectors – all without us marketing to them. It seems that with DoseMapper we do have a new and innovative product that, in those markets, does not need medical regulatory approval.

Finally we won two other awards in 2018. We won the Surrey Business Award for the Business Innovation of the Year and, just before Christmas, we won the Innovate Guildford Award for Innovation in Human Healthcare.

It sounds a lot about us but, of course, it is always a wider team effort and I want to thank all our staff, our Board, our advisors, our investors, our partner hospitals, our suppliers and our supporters, friends and families for your help, guidance and sheer patience in keeping us on this journey. Thank you for sharing in our passion to help clinicians to make radiotherapy safer and more effective for millions of people worldwide.

2018 was an exciting year but 2019 promises to be even busier as we move to launch our products before the end of the next twelve months. I look forward to writing that blog next December.

We don’t often celebrate a graph (in fact I can’t remember ever doing it before!) but this one is well worth shouting about.

A couple of months back our prototype reader heated a DoseMapper™ bead, counted the photons it emitted and plotted this “glow curve” graph. It is pretty much what everyone gets from a normal TLD (thermoluminescent dosimeter) reader so why the fuss? This one is from our utterly new design of reader which will read 100 micro silica DoseMapper™ bead TLDs in about 15 minutes. Current TLD readers would take about 3 hours!

Our DoseMapper™ technology and the reader will enable hospitals to quickly measure the actual dose of radiation received in-body at and around a patient’s tumour and compare it to the treatment plan. Clinicians can then correct any inaccuracies in the next session.

We have been supported for over a year by a great set of shareholders to develop this revolutionary new reader and, after the graph, it is now going into pre-production. That’s why a graph is well worth celebrating!

Last night at the Surrey Business Awards 2018 we were surprised and delighted to win the Business Innovation of the Year Award sponsored by the Surrey Business School. Sadly our founder and inspiration, Dr. Shakar Jafari, could not be there but Nigel Biggs collected the award on her behalf.

Afterwards Nigel reflected on innovation. “Innovation is a journey, often very long and tortuous, from a germ of an idea to commercial and/or community success. Shakar had her idea about improving the accuracy and safety of radiotherapy way back in 2013. She nurtured it through her PhD and was then determined to bring the research to reality especially so that one day it could help improve the lives of many cancer patients in developing countries like her home nation Afghanistan.

Many people have seen our bead array technology, called DoseMapper, and commented that it is very simple and ask why has it not been done before? Shakar answers that she used to make and sell items of jewellery as a child and often played with glass beads. That was the trigger in her mind when she was struggling with the use of fibre-optics in radiation detection and was looking for a simpler alternative – based on the same base material, glass.

Innovation is often about using a technology from one industrial or commercial area and using it in something completely different. A recent example of that was using computer digital technology in the (then predominantly chemical film) photographic industry. We all know what happened next with digital cameras.

The DoseMapper innovation will not replace anything in the medical industry but significantly adds to the quality and safety of radiotherapy! It provides the priceless ability to measure the radiation dose received in-body (or in animals or in nuclear contaminated areas) and give the operator/clinician the opportunity to correct for inaccuracies before any further damage is done.

We are still early in our innovation journey but we have excellent hospital partners, great international medical university research collaborations and a solid band of committed and supportive investors.

That germ of an idea needs ongoing support to make innovation work and all of us at TRUEinvivo thank everyone, including the Surrey Business Awards 2018, for supporting us along the way.”

TRUEinvivo has been nominated as a Finalist in the upcoming Surrey Business Awards under the category Business Innovation of the Year Award. Innovation and its implementation to improve people’s lives has always been the passion of the company and especially that of our founder, Dr. Shakar Jafari. The innovation in our DoseMapper in-body radiation measurement devices, to help clinicians improve the safety and accuracy of radiotherapy, is already being recognised by hospitals and researchers both in the UK and overseas. But recognition by the wider business community of a rather technical company is excellent news for us and for our current investors who have seen the light and backed us already! The winners of the Surrey Business Awards will be announced on 4th October.

The Daily Telegraph reported on 14th August that Innovate UK have used this striking picture of our Founder and CTO, Dr. Shakardokht Jafari, to headline the launch of their second “Women in Innovation” award competition. Shakar won £50,000 in the first competition and used it to properly launch the TRUEinvivo® company. See https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/14/government-pledges-400000-female-entrepreneurs-take-britains/

DoseMapper™: a refreshing solution for inaccurate dosimetry

You might say that the conference season is going rather well for TRUEinvivo!

En route back from the ESTRO event, Shakar joined the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine (IPEM) conference in Manchester, to speak about our DoseMapper™ technology. IPEM had listed “glass beads” as one of their top ten new technologies in dosimetry, and it was good to see strong attendance by UK and EU members.

Once again, Shakar was overwhelmed by the positive response to our product. But what it is about DoseMapper™ that clinicians find so inspiring?

When Shakar talks about her work, you can’t help but notice the audience suddenly “sees the light.” Every clinician wants to deliver good outcomes for their patients, and technological advances are already improving results year on year. But an area that still needs improvement is the measurement of dose accuracy in radiotherapy. When clinicians hear Shakar’s new ideas, they can’t help but find them very refreshing.

Not only are we overcoming a problem, but we’re overcoming it with a very simple solution. The bead arrays we use for DoseMapper™ are just that – glass beads as used for jewellery. OK, we have to prepare them carefully and irradiate and calibrate them but they can be mass-produced, so they’re low-cost. Placing them inside a patient for a few minutes is virtually risk-free, as the beads themselves use no electronics in or near the patient. The beads have no side effects, and do not interfere with any other treatment or medication. Complications are unlikely to arise from the use of our bead arrays. We can see exactly why this appeals to the clinicians we’re talking to, and we feel it will appeal to patients too.

As well as being a simple solution, there’s also something inspirational about DoseMapper™. Most medical engineering is developed incrementally, often highly complex with new technology essentially being an improved version of an existing solution. It is rare that someone comes up with a completely new and very simple idea. But Shakar found a solution to dosimetry inaccuracy that has no relation to other methods. Granted, the automated reader to read the beads is rather complex but we hope that her simple and effective approach to the product will inspire other clinical engineers too.

The simplicity of DoseMapper™ and the wider thinking that lies behind it are, I believe, the reasons why so many clinicians are excited by what TRUEinvivo is doing.

Innovation is all about wider thinking. And Shakar, glass beads and her “Women in Innovation” award embody that approach.

Shakar has inspired many clinicians and engineers at our recent talks. To find out how TRUEinvivo can help you to improve outcomes for cancer patients, please click Contact Us today – we’d love to hear your thoughts and answer your questions.

ESTRO is the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology. Their 37th annual conference took place in Barcelona in April 2018. I attended with Shakar, our founder and Chief Technical Officer, and we were both overwhelmed by the response to TRUEInvivo.

As CEO for the last two years I have a business role – but I’ve also been learning about medical physics, radiotherapy in general and about the potential clinical use of our products.

Eighteen months out from launching our bead array products (now called DoseMapper™) and our fast automated reader, it was time to meet some of the leaders in radiotherapy and learn from their feedback.

Well, what amazing feedback it was!

We had initial meetings with nineteen companies. And a second meeting with four of them. All very positive. One immediately mentioned a possible research trial. One asked about our business direction. And one said: “We need this”!

Senior directors at radiotherapy equipment manufacturers and dosimetry companies were in broad agreement. “This is very interesting – we want to know more.” The first part of that sentence was usually said very slowly. You could see their brains whirring away as they saw the potential for DoseMapper™ to improve outcomes for their patients.

The overall observation, apart from the excellent commercial positives, was that our DoseMapper™ technology is totally complementary to nearly everyone else’s product range and can be seen as independent quality control of dose delivery systems.

One comment from a senior manager in a dosimetry company was that “every company exhibiting here is operating in an industry that lives with uncertainty about what is happening inside the patient. DoseMapper™ will help every company to deliver better patient experiences and treatment outcomes.” This is exactly how we see DoseMapper™ and we are delighted that other companies feel the same way.

And not only dosimetry. The Vice President for Brachytherapy at Elekta, Maarten ter Mors, one of the world’s leading companies in radiotherapy equipment, says:

“I believe that you are homing in on an unmet need in brachytherapy, where dose profiles tend to be so sharp that ‘approximate’ dose measures are not meaningful enough.”

We are really looking forward to working with the companies we met at ESTRO. DoseMapper™ complements all the other radiotherapy products we saw, and together we can work towards our shared vision: to improve outcomes for patients.

If you’d like to find out more about our TLD bead array, DoseMapper™, Contact Us to sign up for our information pack.

]]>https://www.trueinvivo.co.uk/news/excitement-at-estro37-trueinvivo-creates-a-buzz-at-aprils-radiotherapy-conference/feed/0Shakar blogs in Huffington Post about Women In Innovationhttps://www.trueinvivo.co.uk/news/shakar-blogs-at-huffington-post-about-women-in-innovation/
https://www.trueinvivo.co.uk/news/shakar-blogs-at-huffington-post-about-women-in-innovation/#commentsThu, 19 Jan 2017 10:43:25 +0000http://www.trueinvivo.co.uk/?p=418Our founder and CTO, Dr Shakar Jafari blogs in Huffington Post about Women in Innovation and how it is possible to improve cancer care and patients’ quality of life. For more go to http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/shakardokht-jafari/women-in-innovation-impro_b_14048154.html
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